AS many schools across the world reopen for the 2022/2023 academic year there is a renewed call for measures to be put in place that are geared toward keeping schools, students, school staff, and families safe in this phase of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking during the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Science in 5 programme, Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, the organisation’s COVID-19 technical lead, encouraged many countries to continue putting precautions in place to assure safety.

“Schools operate in communities, and the first thing is to make sure that we try to drive transmission down as much as possible in those communities because the individuals that work at those schools live in the communities,” Van Kerkhove said.

She noted that schools should also ensure there are good systems in place within school systems to be able to monitor the health of the students and staff.

“This is a plan to be able to detect cases to ensure that children who are unwell stay at home to make sure that there’s good communication with the students themselves, the faculty as well as the parents so that they know what to do if a student is unwell or if a teacher is unwell to make sure that there’s good provisions within the schools to minimise the reduction, minimise the opportunity for spread of the COVID 19 virus,” she explained.

In March this year, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) said 12 million children were still affected by the partial school closures in the Latin America and Caribbean region.

There was also an average of 168 school days without face-to-face classes between March 2020 and late March 2022.

Van Kerkhove added: “It is really important that students have that continuity in terms of their education and their safety and well-being. It’s about having a plan in place. First of all, if students are feeling unwell, we recommend that they stay home and that they’re cared for by a parent or a guardian at home. If there are cases in the school, they need to be able to be detected so that they can receive the proper care.”

Van Kerkhove continued, saying that we shouldn’t do away with COVID testing.

“They can receive a test, they can receive the proper care that [they need] based upon the symptoms that they have. And then we recommend there to be contact tracing. So the same as we do in the general community, if there is a case that has identified, what we want to do is make sure that we prevent the opportunity from that virus from transmitting from one individual to another,” she said, further adding that it is important to identify the contacts of those children and place them in quarantine for a certain number of days so that they don’t have the opportunity to spread the virus should they be infected.

“But all of that requires detailed planning by the school. It requires good communication with the students themselves. First of all, to take the measures to prevent themselves from getting infected and passing to others, but also to know what to do if they are feeling unwell or if they happen to be a case.”